The Ugly Stepsister movie review (2025) | Little White Lies

The Ugly Step­sis­ter review – a mean-spir­it­ed Cin­derel­la story

23 Apr 2025 / Released: 25 Apr 2025

A person with facial piercings and dreadlocks, wearing a dark cloak, obscuring their face in shadows.
A person with facial piercings and dreadlocks, wearing a dark cloak, obscuring their face in shadows.
4

Anticipation.

A lot of buzz for this out of the festival circuit...

2

Enjoyment.

Gory but quickly tiresome in its reductive view of womanhood.

2

In Retrospect.

A grizzly but unsatisfying spin on the classic Cinderella story.

Emi­lie Blich­feldt takes on medieval beau­ty stan­dards in this gory refram­ing of the Broth­ers Grim­m’s clas­sic take on Cinderella.

As a young­ster I remem­ber being both hor­ri­fied and intrigued to learn that in the Broth­ers Grimm ver­sion of Cin­derel­la’, the heroine’s cru­el step­sis­ters muti­late their feet in an attempt to fit into the cov­et­ed gold­en (not glass!) slip­per dur­ing the story’s cli­mac­tic third act. While the act of des­per­a­tion is intend­ed to show how vain the women are, it also reveals that there is noth­ing some won’t do in the pur­suit of beau­ty. Of course it’s been that way since the begin­ning of time; as long as there have been beau­ty stan­dards to con­form to, women have been harm­ing them­selves accord­ing­ly, from heavy met­als in cos­met­ics to BBLs.

Emi­lie Blich­feldt flips the script with The Ugly Step­sis­ter, focus­ing on the naïve Elvi­ra (Lea Myren), who is pre­sent­ed as a slight­ly gawky but gen­er­al­ly pleas­ant young woman obsessed with her province’s dash­ing Prince Isak (Malte Gårdinger). Elvi­ra and her sis­ter Alma (Flo Fager­li) gain a step­sis­ter in Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Næss) the beau­ti­ful only child of Otto (Ralph Carls­son) who has recent­ly mar­ried Rebe­ka (Ane Dahl Torp), both incor­rect­ly assum­ing the oth­er has a vast for­tune. At first the rela­tion­ship between the new sis­ters is cor­dial; Elvi­ra clear­ly idolis­es Agnes, who is ini­tial­ly wel­com­ing, but after the unex­pect­ed death of her father, the rela­tion­ship between Agnes and her step-fam­i­ly sours. She is unkind to Elvi­ra, while Rebe­ka cru­el­ly refus­es to pay for Otto’s bur­ial and rel­e­gates Agnes to the role of ser­vant in her own home.

Soon word arrives that there is to be a ball for all eli­gi­ble young maid­ens so that Prince Isak can choose his wife. Elvi­ra is ecsta­t­ic, while Agnes sees the Prince as a way to escape her cru­el step­moth­er. But Agnes is already con­sid­ered a great beau­ty and a fine dancer; Agnes is not. Her schem­ing moth­er arranges for her to under­go har­row­ing cos­met­ic pro­ce­dures, includ­ing break­ing and reset­ting her nose to remove a bump and sewing false eye­lash­es onto her eye­lids. Beau­ty is pain, after all.

Blich­feldt can’t decide if her film is sym­pa­thet­ic to Elvi­ra or sees her as the vil­lain. Leer­ing shots of her (thin) body work hard to imply she’s over­weight, while scenes of her gorg­ing on food might sug­gest a binge-eat­ing dis­or­der but feel voyeuris­tic and grotesque rather than dis­turb­ing, as if the audi­ence should revile her. As Elvi­ra con­torts her­self to the whims of her moth­er and dance teacher, she becomes more and more hol­low. Her ini­tial pleas­ant­ness is replaced by inter­nal ugli­ness as she grows vain and self-obsessed, fail­ing to even recog­nise that her beloved Prince Isak might not be all he’s cracked up to be.

All the clas­sic fairy­tales came with a les­son – in Cin­derel­la’ it was that kind­ness is even­tu­al­ly reward­ed, and good will ulti­mate­ly tri­umph over evil. We might be more scep­ti­cal of such ide­al­is­tic sen­ti­ments in the mod­ern age, but at least there was some sort of hope afford­ed to the maligned female lead in the Grimm ver­sion. There is pre­cious lit­tle kind­ness in The Ugly Step­sis­ter, and the unpleas­ant­ness of every char­ac­ter (save for Alma and the sta­ble boy Agnes is sleep­ing with) cre­ates a sour air. Per­haps this is the intent here: to cre­ate a fairy­tale where every­one is the vil­lain. But why pun­ish Elvi­ra quite so relent­less­ly for her attempts to con­form with sur­round­ing society’s expec­ta­tions? Elvira’s trans­for­ma­tion is phys­i­cal and men­tal but not mag­i­cal – she becomes cru­el because she becomes beau­ti­ful. The asso­ci­a­tion between beau­ty and evil is hard­ly trans­gres­sive; The Sub­stance only just fin­ished its awards run. Like Fargeat’s film, The Ugly Step­sis­ter opts to blame women for the impos­si­ble beau­ty stan­dards that per­se­vere, and make them the cru­ellest char­ac­ters in the film. Men stand on the side­lines, leery and grotesque, but ulti­mate­ly pow­er­less. The film’s cre­ative gore alone can­not paper over the ulti­mate flim­si­ness of Blichfeldt’s con­cept, which amounts to an ado­les­cent scrawl of fairy­tale satire, some­how less inter­est­ing and trans­gres­sive than Angela Carter’s The Bloody Cham­ber’ which pre­dates it by 46 years.

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